There is a current LinkedIn discussion going on around the following question, “In one sentence, what’s the number one barrier to transferring learning back to the job?” The answers to this discussion, as with many on LinkedIn and other boards, have differing viewpoints. A common theme with this particular discussion tends to blame the lack of transfer on mangers, supervisors, and after training support. This seems like a reasonable view from this LinkedIn group whose primary audience is comprised of training professionals. And while this was the most common theme, there are still others in the discussion who blame the lack of transfer on poor training. So what we end up with in this discussion is everyone maintaining their position of blame on something beyond control.
What would happen if this discussion were taken a step forward and the debate on blame shifted to a discussion using the following, “Provide one example of how you have improved learning transfer in a current or previous role? What was the role and what did you do?”
Realistically, this question would still solicit some blame in answers; however, instead of 168 comments on blame, it might solicit more useful tips on how to improve transfer. Personally, I would find a discussion like that much more helpful.
How often do your discussions inside your organizations rest on blame and not solutions? Don’t get me wrong, taking time to determine the root cause of issue is important. But more important is what you do after you determine the cause.
What are you doing today to solve your internal issues? What are you doing today to prevent training transfer? What can you do to improve it?
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Sheri Mazurek is a training and human resource professional with over 16 years of management experience, and is skilled in all areas of employee management and human resource functions, with a specialty in learning and development. She is available to help you with your Human Resources and Training needs on a contract basis. For more information send an email to smazurek0615@gmail.com or visit www.sherimazurek.com. Follow me on twitter @Sherimaz.
Twitter and Facebook lead the way following massive earthquake
Social media has been at the forefront of crisis communications during every disaster in recent memory, and this trend has continued in the aftermath of the massive earthquake in Japan. In an article for Mashable.com, Sarah Kessler described the various ways people are getting connected:
Google often creates Person Finder sites during emergencies that allow people to leave information about their whereabouts or information about a missing person. At the time of writing, there were about 158,700 records for Japan — more than 140,000 more records than were submitted to the last such site it set up for the victims of the Christchurch earthquake in February.
The Red Cross site operates in a similar manner, publishing a list of names with contact information of people who want to make it known that they are alive and people whose relatives have indicated they are missing.
But perhaps the most simple method people in Japan have turned to for connecting with loved ones throughout the emergency is posting to their social media accounts. Less than an hour after the quake, the number of tweets from Tokyo topped 1,200 per minute, according to Tweet-o-Meter. An interactive graphic created by Facebook to illustrate status updates related to the quake shows Japan’s activity on Facebook during that day was also high.
Hopefully the grizzled veterans at the Red Cross will eventually combine their experience with the tech prodigies at Google to further improve and advance the ability for people to both get in touch and find or request emergency services despite downed telephone lines or power outages. With incredible stats like 1,200 tweets per minute out of Tokyo, the demand is obviously there.
Applying this to business, you could be left in a similar situation following a disaster, natural or otherwise. How would you communicate with employees and, if possible, keep business running? One minimal solution is to establish and maintain a list of Twitter accounts, while more involved solutions often involve things like employee-only message boards or Internet workstations. Regardless of what your solution is, educate and practice with everyone involved to ensure that things will run smoothly, even in the midst of a crisis.
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For more resources, see the Free Management Library topic: Crisis Management
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After completing my A-Z blogs on Spirituality at Work, I would like to build on this example by highlighting examples of people living out their spirituality. I’ll be writing another A-Z blog series, this time highlighting case studies of how people live out their spirituality at work and home.
For example, for the letter B I could do B is for Janae Bower and then share with you my spirituality practices. I plan on highlighting everyday people like us as well as well-known authors.
I’m looking for YOU! I would love to highlight you and what you do as part of my series. You could write your own blog entry or I could interview you. If you are interested in being part of my new series, please comment below stating:
Your name
Why you would like to be part of this series
A brief list of a few things you do to foster your spirituality
If you would like to write the article or be interviewed
Thank you in advance for your participation. I know that this series will really provide all of us with practical examples of living out our spirituality.
Janae Bower is an inspirational speaker, award-winning author and training consultant. She founded Finding IT, a company that specializes in personal and professional development getting to the heart of what matters most. She started Project GratOtude, a movement to increase gratitude in people’s lives.
A new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine offers insights into what distinguishes high-performing and low performing with regard to deaths of heart attack patients under their care. It’s not the training of the doctors or the investment in high-tech equipment. It’s the organizational culture that makes the greatest difference.
While business executives have long understood the impact of an organization’s culture on the bottom line, it has not been clear if those same qualities could affect how well patients do.
“It’s how people communicate, the level of support and the organizational culture that trump any single intervention or any single strategy that hospitals frequently adopt,” said Elizabeth H. Bradley, senior author and faculty director of the Yale Global Health Leadership Institute at Yale University.
Rather, it was the approach to challenging patient care issues that seemed to set institutions apart. A hospital might discover, for example, that a heart attack patient who returned to the hospital with severe edema, or swelling, might have been discharged without her prescribed diuretic.
At a low-performing hospital, such an error might result in doctors, nurses and pharmacists on the front lines blaming one another and hospital leaders taking care to remain uninvolved. But clinicians and leaders at a high-performing hospital would be eager to address the error, acknowledging it without disparaging one another and working together to re-examine and, if necessary, reconfigure the hospital’s discharge process.
A McKinsey Global Survey asked executives about decisions or events that led to a significant long-term positive change in their work life.
One of the most interesting findings was that both men and women said the single most pivotal event in their careers occurred when they were around the age of 30. That’s when they realized that success would not magically happen. That meant that they had to take responsibility for their careers.
Career Check-Up
I have found, working with successful professionals and leaders, that they regularly evaluated their career choices and career opportunities. The first of these career check-ups is in one’s late 20’s to mid-30’s. That’s when you might be asking these kinds of questions: Am I in the right field or how can I advance more quickly or should I seriously consider a recruiter’s call.
Now back to the survey. Here’s what the participants said:
The top four pivotal events that led to positve change in their work life:
Realization that they had become passionate about new roles or industries.
A new job opportunity at your current organization or a new organization.
Their current jobs had become less attractive and they felt they were going nowhere.
Realization that they were not leading the lives they desired.
The top five individual responses that led to greater career satisfaction:
Took a position in a new company or different industry.
Decided to manage my career more actively.
Took a new position in the same company.
Decided to go back to school for postgraduate degree like a MBA.
Revised my career ambitions or goals..
So what influences your career the most?
It’s the situation you find yourself in and most importantly your response to that situation. Successful people know where they want to go; are alert to changes happening in their career environment; and are not standing still but taking action to move their careers forward.
When was the last time you did a career check-up? Don’t leave your career success to someone else.
In the group of attendees for a recent class in Major Gifts Fundraising was a person identifying herself as a consultant, a member of a fundraising-consulting firm, who was shortly to be working with a client organization in the creation of a major gifts program.
This started me thinking. Who/what is a fundraising/development consultant??
My old dictionary defines a consultant as an expert who is called on for professional or technical advice or opinions.
In this context, I should think there’d be heavy emphasis on the “expert” part of the definition. The problem is that I “hear” many people describing themselves as development consultants that clearly don’t have the education/training and experience it takes to be an expert.
Folks that come from various areas “somewhat related” to development —
i.e., marketing, public relations, special events, etc, even those from totally unrelated fields, feel comfortable hanging out their (fundraising) consultant shingle.
At various luncheons, workshops and seminars, I’ve met people who have worked as volunteers and think they now know enough that non-profits should risk their financial futures on them. And I’ve met folks from other fields, and those out of work, who think that “fundraising might be good to try,” and they want to start as consultants.
So, considering the above, I get the feeling that, to protect the non-profit sector from a “bad rap” and consultants (in general) from having a negative label hung on them/us, there needs to be established some set of criteria for who can/should be a fundraising consultant.
It has been suggested that one must have some sort of “credential” to be a fundraising consultant – that the CFRE (as an example) should be required and should be proof enough that the holder is qualified to be a consultant.
Realistically, however, having the CFRE attests only to the fact that the individual has demonstrated knowledge of the basics of fundraising. That’s not the equivalent of “expert“ !!
Like trusting the health of your loved ones to a physician with an on-line degree; there are many practitioners out there in fundraising-consulting-land to whom you’d not want to trust the financial health of your nonprofit organization.
So, before I get too carried away, I’ll step back and ask, “What do you think?”
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Have a comment or a question about starting, evaluating or expanding your fundraising program? Email me at AskHank@Major-Capital-Giving.com. With over 30 years of counseling in major gifts, capital campaigns, bequest programs and the planning studies to precede these three, we’ll likely be able to answer your questions.
there was a debate for years around whether Project Management is an art or a science.
The truth is that neither are correct on their own – it is both.
Successful project managers (with a track record of more than one project) typically employ the science stuff (core PM concepts), sometimes religiously.
They also harbor a good deal of the “art” side as well. One example of the art would be the harder to define competencies or even what some people call personal qualities that good PMs have, for example judgement. You cannot be a successful project manager (of anything non-trivial) without very good judgement.
Is training being offered in a way that makes it beneficial to employees besides just keeping their jobs?
After 20 minutes, I nearly finished a 25-page online needs assessment for my organization before I clicked the last page and submitted it–disgusted that I had wasted my time. The survey asked me what I needed to do my job. It asked me if what was offered did the job. Is there some other form of training I might be more likely to benefit from? I found the list of topics interesting, mostly relevant to any job, but, for the most part, for someone in my situation–pointless.
There lies the disconnect. Training is still not offered in any meaningful way that makes me want to do my job better. I do it well. We all can benefit from more knowledge–certainly specific knowledge of our jobs–but the why is usually because it is in the best interest in the company. For any training to be beneficial it must be desired; it must have a purpose and a reason to be delivered. What is the end result? How do participants benefit–if they cannot see the benefits of their employment, or their personal development?
It makes employees want to scream: “Leave me alone!” Filling out 25 pages of forms feels like I’m helping someone draft an attractive curricula, not training intended for me.
Then, the next day, I had to sit in a conference call meeting discussing the same needs assessment, but this turned out to be a discussion in which employees expressed concerns about how outside hires shouldn’t be allowed the training because it would give them an unfair advantage over the agency employees. In other words, once the contract was over, the outside hires could use that training on the outside. Bugger!
Set me on a path of success and I’ll work hard, looking toward a positive future for the company and for me.
The training is intended for the company–not me, personally. I get it. But shouldn’t it be? I do the work. The training should be part of my portfolio just as my education and work experience. You know that I will put it on my resume for my next job interview, which is where I am going if I feel any less appreciated because right now people think I can no longer do my job.
Training is rarely viewed as an opportunity to succeed, but rather a way of increasing productivity. Fair enough for business sake, but lousy for personnel retention.
“I’m out of the office training,” says the voice-mail. The tone of voice says I’d rather be working or anywhere but here.
Here’s the way to keep me. Train me for the next job when I’ve mastered this one, or train me for another if this doesn’t look like it’s the best fit. I’m good for something. You invested time and money when you hired me. Help me help you get the most out of your investment.
I have seen very little reward offered for taking extra training–let alone the extra time out of the office or plant. If anything, I have seen more bosses and colleagues upset that people are in training instead of at their place of work. In training for what? Usually, just to do their jobs better, or it’s legal thing and we all have to do it. Is that good to me? Sell me on it. If we all have to do, let’s do it together at one time–if we can. Make it fun–if we can. We have to do it so that makes us a team. The alternative is doing it online (snore) or web cast (also snore).
All of us want to be productive; some of us want to be the “go-to” guy or gal; some of us even want to be boss one day. Put us on a development track where to succeed in training is a good thing. Maybe we don’t have the jobs at the moment, but times change, and we can be ready to fill them with people who have worked to gain the right knowledge to get there.
Get rid of the needs assessment disconnect. Make a training plan that works for the individual, not just the company. It might just mean the employee and company can live happily ever after. But that’s just me. If you have comments or questions on the subject, let’s start a dialogue.
In my book, The Cave Man Guide to Training and Development, I talk about how the idea of training and development began in the cave, how we learned what we know today from the cave men and women who were motivated by survival. Only our organization’s survival is at stake today, not our lives. Imagine what problem solving training issues might have looked like in the cave council. The only difference would be the campfires to keep the cave warm.
These are my words and opinions. Please feel free to disagree and comment, or contact me. If you’re interested in more of my points of view–my Cave Man way of looking at things, I have a website where you can find other items I have written. For more information on my peculiar take on training, check out my best selling The Cave Man Guide To Training and Development, and for a look at a world that truly needs a reality check, see my novel about the near future, Harry’s Reality! Meanwhile, Happy Training.
There’s nothing magical about business planning. At its core, it involves thinking through who your target customers are, how your proposed venture will profitably address their needs better than the competition, how you will communicate with these customers, and where you plan to get the funds to start it all up.
The events of last week remind us that VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) lives just under our radar screen and can catapult us from the status quo into radical change instantly. Like the 2008 economic crisis, events of this magnitude create unavoidable systemic strain that threaten to tear organizations, even countries, apart. As leaders, we need to embrace a mechanism of change that is adaptive, able to respond to internal and external challenges as they emerge rather than as we predict they will happen. Furthermore, we need to embed this adaptive change process into our organizational culture and planning. In this way businesses can absorb changes in the external environment, resilience, and use their internal responses and actions to influence it, co-creation.
Three years ago Onyx Manufacturing1 was first to market with an innovative product and they quickly established themselves as the market leader. Now five new entrants are expected in the next few years and their budget is shrinking as money is shifted to new products in development. They are being squeezed externally by new competitors and internally by changing priorities. These create Adaptive Strain that pulls them away from their current situation (status quo) and into an unknown future. The game is not over for them, but it will be soon if they can’t adapt their thinking and business mindset to this new “reality”. And, while business literature talks about the benefits of operating “at the edge of chaos”, right now it is stability that feels good, not change. When I met with the team leader morale was low, key people were being transferred to the “exciting new products”, budgets were being cut, and the leadership team struggled to express their “reason for being”. Something had to change.
Creating Persistent Patterns
But, what is stability? How does the status quo arise within dynamic systems? In business we like to think of the status quo as a thermostat – a means of controlling a system to maintain its stability. Yet in the dynamic VUCA-web of business, control is a misnomer and even the status quo is unstable.
What we learn from the new sciences is that the status quo is actually the interplay of order and disorder. Our current situation is a snap shot of a dynamic pattern created by energy (resources, people, and ideas) flowing through a system (a set of functions that create products and services), influenced by the structure of the system (organizational design).Think of a stream, the water is the energy and the stream bed structure, its function is to allow movement or flow. The status quo is the whole dynamic system at any point in time. Imagine, for example, the water level (energy) exposes a large rock (structure) which creates a whirlpool, a “stable” pattern; which in this case we can call the Onyx brand team and its product. We mistakenly believe that this stable pattern exists outside of the system rather than being a product of the system. When we base our thinking and leadership actions on this belief we lose resilience and the ability to evolve and co-create our future.
What the Onyx team is experiencing now is a change in the dynamic system and the creation of a new status quo. Their resources are drying up causing the “stable” whirlpool pattern to become unstable with the real possibility that it could disappear. In addition, this exposes new rocks in the terrain, new competitors that threaten to create stable patterns of their own. The status quo of the system is changing and unless the brand team actively participates in this change (through resilience and co-creation) they run the risk of disappearing from the system altogether. To address the systemic transactional change, the brand team needs to create a Vision of a new status quo that is significantly different from the one they live in today. This Vision of the Future must address the Adaptive Strain within the system in order to adapt to aspects of it they can’t control. In this way they can evolve their distinctive, coherent pattern and conserve a place for themselves within the future status quo.
Leadership Inquiry for the Status Quo
What dynamic patterns do you believe are permanent but in reality aren’t?
What meaning do you derive from these patters?
How does this limit your ability to adapt to both opportunities and threats?
Considering your “whirlpool”: Is there too much stability (control) or instability (change) for long-term sustainability?
Are your team’s Purpose and Vision able to maintain our pattern when VUCA enters the system?
1 – A fictitious company.
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